Tag Archives: Himalayas

People living on the slopes of the Himalayas called him “the man of the glaciers.” With his inventions, Cheawang Norphel, engineer of 77 years, is fighting at the local effects of global warming that threatens dozens of villages.

The glaciers are retreating and is missing the water that is used to irrigate the fields of these people live from agriculture. While scientists and politicians debate climate change, here’s what was invented by Norphel: the artificial glaciers, a series of stone walls on the shady slopes of the mountains that hold the ice and bring the water to the fields through channels.

“We have built seven stone walls in series to contain and control the ice water. Rainfall in the region of Ladakh are so small that agriculture has almost exclusively on the water of the mountains.”

Many of the artificial glaciers that were built swept away flood, and governmental funds seem to dry. But the man of the glaciers go ahead with the experiments. Norphel is well aware that his solutions will not save the glaciers, but, it is valuable for the survival of the Himalayan people for the time being.

Studies have found that glaciers in parts of the greater Himalayas are growing, despite the worldwide trend of the melting of ice due to warmer temperatures. In the Karakoram mountain range on the border of Pakistan and China, researchers said that the Himalayan glaciers have defied global warming and became larger over a decade.

Three dimensional maps of the mountain was produced by French scientists, which is separated from the Himalayas but usually considered part of the same chain, between 1999 and 2008.

Their findings suggest that the region is contravening the global pattern of glacier shrinkage, which is taking place elsewhere in the Himalayas and around the planet.

The impact of global warming in the region has been controversial since there was a report that the Himalayan range could disappear by 2035.

The Nature Geoscience journal published that the rate of ice loss in the Himalayas was being overestimated due to monitoring methods that are inadequate.